What is Project?

When you find yourself jugging multiple projects, interrupted schedules, and shared resources, maintaining a schedule in a spreadsheet becomes an overwhelming task. With its dynamic scheduling engine, resouce management tools, and support for better communication, Microsoft Project 2010 can help you stay on track.

Take advantage of enterprise-wide resource management

With Microsoft Project Professional 2010, all projects in your organization can draw from a central, enterprise-wide resource pool. This enables project managers to quickly see the availability of a resource before assigning that resource to a task.

Calculate the effect of date changes

Project can help you quickly adjust your project schedule and resource assignments with its dynamic scheduling engine. It handles a date change and its effects seamlessly, accounting for all dependencies, deliverables, and resource assignments. Not only does it automatically recalculate the schedule, but Project also highlights the dates it change so that you can quickly see the effect of each schedule shift.

Use flexible reporting methods

With Project, you can quickly generate a visual report that uses a template that exports the data to a PivotDiagram in Microsoft Visio Professional. You can choose which fields that you want to highlight in the report, including any custom fields that you have set up for your project, and present a clean, concise report for your meeting with management.

To use a template that you already have installed, click My Templates, select the template that you want, and then click OK.

To find a template on Office.com, under Office.com Templates, click a template category, select the template that you want, and then click Download to download the template from Office.com to your computer.

Note: You can also search for templates on Office.com from within Project. In the Search Office.com for templates box, type one or more search terms, and then click the arrow button to search.

Create and schedule a new project

Make sure that Blank Project is selected, and then click Create on the right pane.

On the Project tab, in the Properties group, click Project Information.

Schedule the project in the Project Information dialog box:

To schedule from the start date, click Project Start Date in the Schedule from box, and then select the start date in the Start date box.

To schedule from the finish date, click Project Finish Date in the Schedule from box, and then select the finish date in the Finish date box.

Tip: Schedule from the finish date if you need to find out how late you can start a project. However, we recommend that you change this setting to schedule from the start date when work begins on the project.

If you are using Project Professional 2010, you can include enterprise custom fields in the project. In the Enterprise Custom Fields section, click the Value field for a custom field, and then select the value.

Note: You must enter values for required enterprise custom fields, marked by an asterisk (*), or you won't be able to save the project.